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An anonymous reader writes "If we break a bone it can take weeks or even month to heal depending on the type and severity of the break. In some extreme cases the complexity of the fracture can make it impossible to heal properly. Researchers at the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center have come up with a new solution for healing broken bones that cuts recovery time to days. It relies on the use of stem cells that contain a bone generating protein. These cells are injected in gel form directly into the area of the broken bone, where they quickly get to work forming new bone. The end result is very rapid recovery, possibly sidestepping the muscle atrophy that can come with long bone healing times. The gel has been proven to work on animals as big as a sheep and has funding from the DoD. Lets hope it is proven to work on humans in the coming years."

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I had my ankle fused recently and part of the procedure was some kind of putty that they infused with a small sample of marrow they scraped from right below my knee. My recovery was about a month, but it worked remarkably well. I am not sure how that compares to the procedure in this article, but it is not hard to harvest the needed stem cells from the patient themselves.

if you don't have a large supply of your own stem cells in your home fridge

They know (in the lab anyway) how to take a random cell from you, force it to turn into a pleuripotent stem-cell and then make it become a 'whatever' (e.g. bone) cell. A happy side effect of Bush's fetal stem cell ban.

So, I guess on a long-term basis, you'll have to wait a few days after you break your bone for this kind of treatment. Or, I guess if you're rich you can have this kind of stuff banked and ready. It's not worth $10,000 a year to me to guard against this kind of wait, but maybe if I had 4 billion in the bank I'd look at it differently.

I just spent six weeks in a cast after breaking my right arm Christmas Night (no...no rogue or drunk reindeer involved). There is now a titanium plate and six screws in my arm. My other wrist is broken also (yes...I fell and had a hell of hard time getting up). Now, I have to endure painful PT to regain full use of my arm again and have a 5 inch scar too (no...it is NOT cool).

How I would have loved to have this stuff injected into the fractures and have it immobilized for a few days while it took action and fuzed the bones. I do hope this comes to fruition...cool stuff. Who said war wasn't useful?

No it doesn't, they just remember the names of places. The Chaser did a bit where they took a map and rewrote it so that Australia was labelled as either Iran or North Korea, then showed that map to Americans and asked them to located them. They just saw the name, and pointed at it saying "there it is!"

I'm not so sure they're learning much geography from war. The last time, they were looking for a Saudi-Arabian man who attacked them from Afghanistan and went hiding in Pakistan, yet they went looking for him in Iraq.

Take all the money we spend on wars and spend it on R&D. We'll get a lot more cool stuff a lot faster. War is not useful. It's good for absolutely nothing.

If the money not spent on war were spent instead on R&D, this would be true -- cut the DoD budget in half and give the money to NIH and NSF, and we'd have a boom in science and technology like none the world has ever seen. But politics doesn't work that way. The military wastes a hell of a lot of money, no question about it. It also spend a lot of money on very worthwhile research, and like it or not, it's easier to get Congress to appropriate that money for wounded soldiers. Who, regardless of your opinion on the way in which they were injured, deserve to have their wounds cared for as well as possible by the same government that sent them out to get injured in the first place.

In the specific area of trauma care, the simple fact is that most of modern emergency and orthopedic medicine is an outgrowth of military medicine. Like it or not, next time you call 911, you'll have a much better chance of survival because of generations of work directed toward keeping wounded soldiers alive.

I don't know, they had some pretty solid hits ("Low Rider", "Spill the Wine", "The Cisco Kid" and "Why Can't We Be Friends?") and seem to have a fairly decent following. Just because you don't like American Funk, doesn't mean someone else doesn't.

I broke my arm and dislocated my elbow in november. Looks like I'll make a complete recovery but it's quite painful and annoying.

However the break isn't the problem, the plate and screws fix that. The problem is the dislocated elbow and the tissue damage and damage to tendons, muscles etc. That's what it takes time to recover from and I doubt that this will help with that part...

If I were an injured soldier, I might want a break. Perhaps athletes will be among the first adopters. If you want to find people who are often injured, and to whom recovery might be worth tens of thousands of dollars per day, look to the NFL.

I really wish this discussion would take a more serious tone than boning sheep!

I was involved in a serious car accident last May (I was the front seat passenger and the other driver was at fault), and which resulted in a compound fracture of my Tibia and Fibula. I spent 2 weeks in a trauma center followed by 3 weeks in a rehabilitation hospital, followed by months of physical therapy, and now wound care (the force of the impact ripped the front of my leg open). My most recent X-rays show inco

Sorry man - I feel for you. Broke my scaphoid snowboarding 8 or 9 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphoid_fracture). It was in smithereens, really; a full break down the middle and another less-complete fracture offshooting from the center of that. Which ones did you break? The wrist, especially, has a lot of little bastards in a wee tiny bit of space, and anything needing pins in your other arm must have meant it was NASTY.

I consider myself religious and do not hate stem cells. In fact, I support stem cell research. "People that are against stem cell research" have been trying to block this, not religious people. Yes, as with everything, there is some overlap. But many religious people own toasters. Does that mean all religious people like toast?

I've been trying to find some stats on atheists who object to stem cell research - but I can't find many. What I have found are a number of atheist and Christian forum type sites which discuss stem cell research (among other things). Overwhelmingly, the atheists support stem cell research - in the region of 95% - 98%. The reverse is true of Christians (I don't have time to do much research into other religions, but as that's the vast majority of American religious types, I'll stick with that). There seems t

I've only seen conservatives and the religious get their panties in a twist over fetal stem cell research. Back in the day, W made it as explicit as possible that he was only banning fetal stem cell research.

>I've only seen conservatives and the religious get their panties in a twist over fetal stem cell research. Back in the day, W made it as explicit as possible that he was only banning fetal stem cell research.

1) Back in the day when he made that ban, there wasn't any other kind. The adult stem-cell harvesting techniques only got invented to get around the ban.

2) Even then it was stupid. Nobody was proposing doing special abortions for stem cells, just using the ones from the abortions happening anyway. Even then that wasn't required - fetal stem cells don't require abortions at all and could even then be harvested in quantity from things like the placenta and umbilical cord.So there was a massive ready supply being dumped in the medical waste basket at every hospital maternity ward in the world for no reason whatsoever.

Now while the discovery of adult stem-cell harvesting opened up some useful new avenues of treatment, the fact is that the gap between the ban and that development greatly slowed down massive areas of research and many treatments that may have been becoming available now will still be away for several years - years during which many patients will die who would have lived if not for that ban.So much for a pro-life law.

I'd actually go you one further and say "some people you refer to" instead of "religious people you refer to".

Religion doesn't necessarily have have anything to do with opinions on abortive stem cell harvesting, research, or usage, for either side. Here are two anecdotal examples:

1- My mother is very religious, but thinks abortive stem cells should be harvested since the embryos/fetuses are lost already. Her position is one of salvaging what possible good can come from what is essentially a complet

As I said, these are anecdotal, but I can see lots of people having various opinions on this type of subject, and the claim that only the religious are on one side and only the non-religious are on the other is just plain false.

You're right, of course. "Religious" is a broad spectrum even within Christianity.

Not that odd. Soldiers have (ostensibly) a choice. Fetuses (which are viewed as living humans by those against abortion and against embryonic stem cell use) are not given the choice.
Fight the belief that a fetus is a living human being if you want to fight those against abortions and embryonic stem cell research. So long as you enter the debate assuming (rather than proving) that a fetus is not a living human being you cannot possibly win them over because your whole argument is a non-sequitur to the o

whats really odd is conservatives are fine with killing adults knowing sometimes they just might fry an innocent person, but the second you suggest an abortion of a non sentient cluster of tumor-like cells they scream like a stuck pig.

This is only true because it is easier and more economical to destroy the blastocyst for collection than it is to harvest single cells from them nondestructively.

This then causes a viscious circle, in which researchers requiring access to fresh embryonic cell cultures are strapped for cash and labspace/time, because they are denied funding, because of destructive collection techniques. Being strapped for cash and time, they can't realistically use nondestructive techniques using the limited funds they get from private investments, and still do their research... necessitating destructive collection. (Which in turn, reinforces the situation where they don't get grant money.....)

The solution is to offer grant money with the hardlined requirement of nondestructive collection. When the majority of embryonic stemcell collection is non-fatal to the embryos, then the religious types won't object to the collection and research.

The scientists cannot really be the ones to act here; they are strapped for research funds enough already, and are the victims of the viscious circle. The ones that need to act are the religious politicians who are currently ignorant/recalcitrant of the non-destructive alternatives. (These non-destructive approaches have been around since the 90s, when the whole embryonic stemcell shitstorm started. I remember a c-span segment late on a Saturday night with a cellular biologist giving a presentation against the stemcell funding ban to a practically empty building. The politicians had scheduled his presentation for a time when they wouldn't be there. The whole basis of his presentation was the refutation of the "embryonic stemcells == murder" partyline that was driving the ban's momentum. It was a very good presentation, but again, nobody was in attendance.)

If you ask the hardnosed "embryonic stemcells are murder!" Religious crowd what they would think if the cells could be harvested without destroying the blastocyst, thus preserving it for future implantation, you will find that they react with shock, curiosity of if that's true, and then curiosity/anger of why that isn't done exclusively.

The problem is not that the tissue comes from blastocysts. The problem is that the blastocysts are destroyed. This is only necessary because of the funding restrictions an.d the added costs and culture times associated with single cell extractions.

Fix the funding problem with some limiting verbage to require nondestructive collection, and the whole ethical tapestry dissolves like cotton candy in a rainstorm.

Of course, the real challenge is getting the willfully ignorant in government to realize what they are doing.... as the poor researcher found out the hard way. I don't remember his name, but whoever he is, I do applaud the effort.

There exist treatments overseas for increasing a person's height which rely on repeatedly fracturing leg bones and spacing them such that they heal at a distance, essentially lengthening the bone.

Do we have any osteopathologists on slashdot who can comment on whether this can theoretically shorten such a procedure's duration to make someone taller in a matter of one or two weeks? The current procedure takes at least a few months, if not a year.

Well in my case, I'm taken. Still, I know a few people (cousins, friends, what-have-you) who constantly stress about their height to the point where I've gone from lying about height's irrelevance to them to proposing alternative solutions just to get them to hush a bit. Granted this was back when the people I knew cared more about this sort of thing, but this submission did a good job of reminding me. hah

1) They are usually harvested from the entity translated too so less problem with rejection ( is this the case here the article didn't say).2) The have been proven to work and use in many other places.3) No one has any moral objections to them.

So many good reasons to not even worry about fetal stem cells , but no one ever bothers to talk about that.

There is also a product called 'kryptonite' which is often used for chest surgery which is like a compound glue that sets within 24 hours. Very much improved my heart surgery healing time but I also wish they used it on my knee to improve that repair time.

Seems to me this would be a great benefit to veterinarians. The hardest part of treating a fracture in an animal is getting the patient to stay still while they recuperate. Would be a lot easier to do that for a couple of days vs. several weeks. Racehorses might be able to live with injuries that result in euthanasia now.

You might be better off with a surgically implanted spike + extender. God knows how you'd ever manage to keep it sterile, let alone bind in the neural controls to make it work, but it's probably easier and simpler than growing bones plus muscles to extend things.

No consciousness = no ability to suffer or to have emotions. They don't feel pain, their nervous system just processes the information that it is wounded the same way your laptop processes the fact that it's battery is empty or that it's keyboard has been amputated... I mean unplugged.They respond to wounds and injuries, but they don't interpret any of it as pain without consciousness. And no evidence shows sheep are conscious (unlike other animals).

There is exactly as much evidence to show that sheep, plants, and rocks are conscious as there is to show that humans are conscious.

Step 0: Cogito ergo sumStep 1: Define consciousnessStep 2: Describe the physical construct and mechanisms which create consciousnessStep 3: Identify consciousness in various thingsStep 4: Show that no other construct / phenomena could result in consciousnessStep 5: Identify a lack of consciousness in various things

In this new study, the researchers used a rat model of ALS to test for possible nerve cell- restoring properties of stem cells. The rats were exposed to Sindbis virus, which infects the central nervous system and destroys the motor neurons in the spinal cord. Rats that survive are left with paralyzed muscles in their hindquarters and weakened back limbs. Scientists assess the degree of impairment by measuring the rats' movement, quantifying electrical activity in the nerves serving the back limbs, and visua